The East breaks into bloom
Sliding from the Baltic towards the interior, dress changes character. Gone is the severe geometry in red and white: here, everything covers itself in flowers. Roses, peonies, full and colourful bouquets invade the sleeves, the waistcoats, the aprons, on a ground of linen or pale wool.
The rule is simple: the more you embroider, the greater the feast. Everyday dress stays sober, but the Sunday or wedding outfit disappears under the flowers, enough to make a garden pale. Colour is not timid here, it bursts out.
This area spills over the languages. You find Western Slavs there, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, but also Hungarians, who are not Slavs at all and speak a language come from elsewhere. What unites them is not blood, it is this shared taste for the sewn flower.
Poland in colour: Kraków
When you think “Polish costume”, it is the one from Kraków that comes to mind: the woman in a laced red bodice, with rows of coral at the neck and a flowered skirt; the man in the long blue coat and the square hat, the rogatywka, stuck with a peacock feather and ribbons.
This costume of a single region became “the” national costume by a very political choice. In the nineteenth century, when a Poland wiped off the map was looking for symbols, the Kraków peasant, reputed proud and combative, ended up representing the whole country.
That takes nothing from its beauty or its liveliness. It is still danced, the krakowiak underfoot, and the skirt turns in a whirl of red, flowers and coral. A costume of pride as much as of feast.
The bodice and the ribbon
Look more closely at the Kraków bodice, the gorset. It is a sleeveless piece, fitted at the waist, entirely covered with embroidery of flowers, sequins and beads, often edged with small cut tabs. A parade armour.
Around it, everything is a sign: the rows of red coral, which told a family's wealth and were held to protect health; the silk ribbons hanging down the back; the bunch of flowers in the hand for girls of marrying age. A language the whole village could read.
It is an art of layering and unabashed colour, the opposite of the sobriety of the North. Here, people are not afraid to pile it on. Restraint will come from elsewhere; the charm of this region is precisely its abundance.
Kalocsa and Matyó: embroidering paradise
Hungary made the embroidered flower an art in its own right. Two names sum it all up: Kalocsa, in the south, and Matyó, around Mezőkövesd. Their embroidery, bouquets of roses and leaves in a dazzling red, blue and green, ranks among the most famous in Europe.
Strikingly, this explosion of colour is fairly recent. Kalocsa embroidery was at first white on white; only at the end of the nineteenth and in the twentieth century did it turn multicoloured, as dyed threads became affordable. An “ancestral” tradition that in fact evolved a great deal.
Matyó embroidery is even inscribed on the heritage of humanity. In Hungary, they say these flowers represent the garden of paradise. Hard to prove them wrong when you look at them.
The highlanders of the Carpathians
There is another central Europe, harsher, that of the mountains. Along the Carpathians, from Poland to Romania, lives a world of shepherds, the Górale and their cousins, who kept a costume apart, cut for the slope and the cold.
The man wears trousers of thick white wool cloth, close at the leg, embroidered at the thigh with a motif of hearts and scrolls, the parzenica. Over it, a sheepskin waistcoat, a felt hat, and on the feet soft leather shoes, the kierpce. He does not move without his axe-stick, the ciupaga.
It is a wardrobe of herdsmen, made of raw wool and hide, cousin to that of the shepherds of the whole range. The same trade, the same mountain, produce the same answers, from one end of the Carpathians to the other.
Slovakia and Moravia: the kroj
Push towards the south-west, into Slovakia and Moravia, and you meet the kroj, probably the most loaded costume in all this Europe. Puffed sleeves starched like balloons, skirts pleated by the hundred, laces, ribbons, built-up headdresses, and embroidery wherever there is room left.
Each village had its own, so precise that you identified the town of origin from a detail of the headdress or the embroidery. In some, the bride's dress took days to put on and weighed on the shoulders like an armour of flowers.
From Poland to Hungary, from the plains to the Carpathians, it is finally the same idea that runs. To make festive dress a joyful profusion, an overflow of colour and thread, as far as possible from the greyness of every day. Another way, a dazzling one, of putting all your care into what you wear.
